In January, NJPAC got permission from the Landmarks Commission to demolish the Cathedral House at 24 Rector Street. The building would become the sixth historic building within the Military Park Historic District that the arts organization has torn down. But the Cathedral House is different from the other lost buildings because it was one that NJPAC expressly swore to protect.
The past two hearings of the Landmarks Commission reminded preservationists of a painful history of NJPAC’s broken promises. The first and perhaps the most serious offense began at the earliest part of its history, before the performance hall was built, with the mishandling of a burial ground.
NJPAC is built on a cemetery that once belonged to Trinity Episcopal Church — that fact alone is not uncommon in old cities. The Prudential Center was also built on a burial ground. However, there are strict federal guidelines to ensure the remains are treated with dignity — but that is not what experts say happened.
The remains of 41 bodies at the cemetery had already been disinterred during the construction of the Cathedral House, completed in 1941, and again for a parking lot in 1966 behind the building. Those human remains were moved to Newark’s Fairmont Cemetery.
But there were even more remains hidden beneath the soil on the site where NJPAC wanted to build its performance hall. In 1993, construction work came to a screeching halt when workers found human bones. The state government got involved in the archaeology of the site because the project used federal funds — $1.2 million in CDBG money — triggering a Section 106 review of the National Historic Preservation Act.
NJPAC hired archaeologist Barry Greenhouse and his firm Greenhouse Consultants, setting out an ambitious schedule to unearth 10 burials per week. More than $200,000 was set aside for the project. A month later, however, the dig was abruptly stopped. In the end, only 21 burials were obtained.
In 1993, Gail Thompson, NJPAC’s then-vice president, said the cost of the archeological investigation had quadrupled from $213,500 to more than $1 million and wanted to end the dig.
“I was called into Gail’s office one day and she said, ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough and we’re not doing anymore,’” Greenhouse said. “It seemed odd to me — they had spent a lot of money on it.”
Thompson argued that many empty graves were being found, and those that were located were in “much poorer condition than anticipated and are inadequate for analysis.”
Her defense was that using almost all of the $1.2 million federal funds on the excavation — when only about $200,000 was allocated for it, was “clearly not the intent and purpose underlying the grant.”
There were clear directions from New Jersey’s Historic Preservation Office about how the remains were to be handled to avoid contamination. But in the end, they were dumped in the basement at 42 Park Place, a building on NJPAC’s campus, violating the terms of the agreement and federal guidelines.
William Sandy, who worked for Greenhouse Consultants, wrote to Thompson in 1994 on his company’s letterhead that the excavated human remains were not being stored properly and developed mold and showed a “lack of respect for these people and their descendants.”
Robert Bush, then the executive director of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, accused NJPAC in a 1994 letter of squandering the CDBG funds as a result of “poor management and contracting problems.”
“Proper archeological research and suitable respect for the dead should not arbitrarily suffer to compensate for these regrettable circumstances,” Bush wrote.
There is still an ongoing debate about how many people were buried at the cemetery. The initial estimate was 250 people. During the excavation, the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office came under the impression there were as many as four times that amount. The answer will forever remain a mystery because the site was never completely excavated. Instead, NJPAC was given permission after a legal battle to bulldoze the remaining cemetery. The moldy bones dumped in NJPAC’s basement were never analyzed, but instead cremated.
The cemetery at Trinity Episcopal Church was founded in 1808 and it is believed that 50 black church members were interred there. The last black church member buried there was in 1829. It is often referred to as an African-American cemetery, but it is actually a mixed-race burial ground and that makes it even more rare.
Black Newarkers living in this era are often not recorded in church records. But many are in the case of Trinity Church Cemetery. In fact, archeologist William Sandy told our publication that one of the coffins he found bore the name of Robert Armstrong, whom he learned was a black sea captain from St. Croix. He was also a slaveholder while in the Caribbean, adding a layer of complexity to the story.
The discovery in 1993 of bones in Newark came not long after an African-American cemetery was found in Manhattan at 290 Broadway, which became a national monument in 2006. Sandy, who was also involved in that excavation, said what happened at the Newark cemetery was lost opportunity.
“If it wasn’t an important find we wouldn’t have been there to dig those graves,” Sandy said. “What’s important is we have these agreements and we follow through with them. But NJPAC had a lot of money and decided they didn’t have to do that.”
There was a hope at the time that the cemetery might also become a landmark, according to historian Lauren O’Brien, who published a story about the Newark cemetery called The Resurrection of a Ghost City.
“Although enslaved people are buried there, there is a unique story to tell about Newark that it is an interracial cemetery and that speaks to some of the relationships of the people living there,” she said.
Today, after years of community members pressuring NJPAC to honor the dead, there is memorial to those who were buried there as well as a historical marker dedicated to Cudjo Banquante, a former slave who was freed by Benjamin Coe after Banquante served as Coe’s substitute in the Revolutionary War. But even this memorial required years of fighting. In the end, some names were left off the monument, O’Brien said.
“Initially the community did not feel heard,” she said. “There is still a tension of how to continue building in a city while still preserving and honoring its history.”
The historical marker notes that Banquante was buried “near here,” acknowledging the lack of certainty that might have been avoided if the excavation had been done as originally promised. But there is something even more unnerving about the legacy of the unfinished project: no one knows exactly what happened to Banquante’s remains as a result of the balked excavation.
“Was Cudjo Banquante disinterred and cremated or left buried in the rear parking lot?” Myles Zhang, historian and one of only two members of the Landmarks Commission to vote against the demolition of the Cathedral House. “I can’t rule out the possibility that the graves are in a landfill somewhere. At the same time, state and federal law does require the identification and reinterment of human remains.”
NJPAC didn’t respond to a request for comment.
